Grappling with grief, the passing of time, and the paradoxes and slippery truths of modern womanhood, the work chases the desire to be present, balancing the fun of the party with the melancholy of leaving it. McGurn was born and raised in Glasgow and studied painting in Dundee, so this show is something of a homecoming. As a student, she lived three doors down from DCA.
Although she knows nostalgia can be a “dirty word” among artists, McGurn says that “a melancholic grappling with the past is part of painting”. She has always worked from extensive source material, but for this show, she has allowed that archive of images to be visible to viewers. Film stills, magazine ads, family photos, and other ephemera that inspire her find their way on to the canvas for the first time.
Working with a studio in Glasgow, she has the images blown up and printed on canvases, resulting in a lo-fi, retro aesthetic. Sometimes, the images are entirely obscured by paint, existing as ghosts beneath another composition. In other works, McGurn adds very little paint to the canvas, allowing the printed image to dominate.
In one large work, Motor, an image of the van her family drove throughout her childhood is printed on the canvas. On top of it, McGurn has painted silhouettes of her young daughter and her mother, the artist Rita McGurn, who died in 2015. It becomes a circular portrait of time passing, of intergenerational inheritance and legacy.
As McGurn and I talk, her mother seems almost to be in the studio with us: her influence on her daughter is so evident. But the ethos of using what you have and figuring it out as you go along is fundamental to McGurn. In that vein, the DCA show also includes stuff for the first time: McGurn has transported the paint-covered sofa from her studio, hoping that visitors will feel inclined to settle into it and spend time in the space.
There are painted wallets and other ephemera, partly there to revel in the luxury of having such a huge gallery space to fill with anything and everything – but also there to reaffirm her mother’s maxim that anything can be painted on. There is a spatial element, too. She often features her own body as a reference.
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